10/9/2010

Which gets us into a bigger question: tell me why I should be skeptical of the concept of man-made global warming. Because it’s my impression that the scientific consensus supports it.

I hate it when scientific questions become political issues — because I think politics causes people to lose rationality. And i think this has become a virtual religion for both sides.

So I am looking for evidence.

This thread will employ the rule of excessive politeness. Nothing even remotely disparaging will be permitted. And I’m not keeping any part of a comment that violates the rule. Your comment that opens: “I’m surprised you would fall for AGW” followed by 10 paragraphs of polite and well researched material gets nuked, entirely. I could end up deleting 90-99 percent of all the comments, leaving only comments by Bradley J. Fikes. I don’t care. This is such a hot-button issue that I’m not putting up with even a milligram of B.S. or invective.

I will probably play devil’s advocate in the threads. The goal is to hash out the issues and put the religious faith aside.

So: why should I doubt what appears to be a scientific consensus?

UPDATE: Looks like the timing of this post is lucky given this letter of resignation linked by commenters below, written by Hal Lewis, which became public just today.

I never heard of him before and it’s one guy, but it’s timely . . .

UPDATE x2: To clarify: I consider myself agnostic on this subject, but I interested in learning the arguments on both sides. I consider myself an “AGW skepticism skeptic” — meaning that I am not willing to simply accept AGW skepticism because it is conservative dogma, any more than I will accept AGW because it is liberal dogma.

I believe we pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and that doing so contributes to warming. How much, I have no idea. That’s about as much as I feel I “know.” But I’m willing to play devil’s advocate to tease out the arguments.

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